70 company, that the actions that are taken are yours.' " As soon as Nicholas became presi- dent, he instituted a major cost-cutting program, which included layoffs of hundreds of employees in the magazine division, as well as cutbacks in its ex- pense-account practices. These mea- sures were a rude shock to that privi- leged sector, which had long enjoyed one of the cushiest domiciles in j our- nalism, often referred to resentfully by some in other parts of the company as "the plantation." The journalists had been Luce's pampered favorites, and Donovan's and Heiskell's, too, but they were not Nicholas's. Nicholas's preoc- cupation was the bottom line: trying to boost earnings, in order to close the wide gap between Time's stock price and its breakup value, and thus make the company less vulnerable to take- over. Referring to his predecessors- particularly Heiskell, who headed the company from 1960 to 1980-Nicho- las remarked to me, "It was a wonder- ful age. If you were managing a public company, you didn't have to explain anything to anybody. People from that time have no idea what it is like today." In its rapt fixation on its profit mar- gins, Time under Nicholas was, of course, no different from a multitude of blue-chip companies that had been jolted out of complacency by the pan- demic restructuring of the eighties. But under Luce and his handpicked succes- sors the company had had "twin mo- tivations," which one former Time executive has described as "to do jour- nalism in the public interest-and to make a buck." The money-making, however, was done chiefly in the service of the jour- nalism-not the other way around. "Luce was almost arrogant in his treatment of the business people, and many of them resented this," a former high-ranking member of Time's edito- rial staff recalls. It was to insure that the editorial side would operate free from intrusion by the business side that Luce had drawn his line between "church" and "state." At the time he reigned as editor-in-chief and C.E.O., he himself, of course, em- bodied both. With Donovan and Heiskell, the practice of church and state changed slightly, mainly by virtue of the fact that there were now two people at the top instead of one. "Hedley and I dis- SOFT FR.UIT Our lanes turn on the ends of fields- a legacy of medieval Danish land tenure, I'm told. Hence the bends are atrocious- folly to whip past, as two cars did at midnight last Saturday, doing at least eighty, two blasts of noise and light, two spasms, pangs, and gone- except, just over a humpbacked bridge, on the dark and silent bank one car, upside down, wheels softly astir in a stink of burnt rubber, and answering to flashlights and voices two faces in the interior peering out, with silly smiles: safe, of course, perfectly intact- in the dark of a bush surrounded by frightful thorns two ripe gooseberries hanging, luscious, asking to be picked. - MAIRI MACINNES . cussed nearly everything," Heiskell re- called. "Church and state, after all, had to meet somewhere, even if it was in a dark corner. Hedley, as editor-in- chief, did pretty much what he pleased, bu t we had to discuss things, and each know what the other was doing, or it would have fallen apart." The parity that existed between the C.E.O. and the editor-in-chief during the Heiskell-Donovan years was in large measure a function of the atti- tudes, and the closeness, of the two men. Donovan presided over only about fifty per cent of Time Inc., whereas Heiskell oversaw the entire company, but both were imbued with the Lucean mission. (Heiskell had been a journalist, and was widely popular wi th the editorial staff.) Before Dono- van retired, in 1979, he decided that if MfA . the concept of church and state was to be preserved it needed to become less personality-driven and more institu- tionalized. He therefore wrote what is now referred to as "the Donovan char- ter," a document, approved by the board, that decreed that the editor-in- chief would be responsible only to the board (of which he would be a mem- ber), not to the company's C.E.O., and that in editorial matters he would be the counterpart of the C.E.O. Donovan was prescient. Whereas he and Heiskell had operated in friendly league, Donovan's chosen successor, Henry Grunwald, and Munro were utterly disjunctive. Grunwald, a Vien- nese immigrant with a formidable in- tellect, who was eminent on the New York social scene, intimidated and an- tagonized Munro. "Munro was petri- fied of Henry, and Henry really wasn't interested in what Munro, or others on the business side, thought," a former Time executive recalls. "He let it be a chasm. What evolved in top manage- ment was an antipathy toward the of- fice of editor-in-chief." That antipathy reached its peak af- ter the Israeli general Ariel Sharon brought suit against Time for libel in a cover story, which had said that, be- fore the Christian Phalangists mas-